Dailymotion, the 2nd-largest video portal in the world, is re-launching its Dailymotion Cloud service this morning, bringing further competition to the already crowded online video platform space.

Dailymotion Cloud has been enhanced with features like DRM support for Adobe Flash Access and Microsoft Playready, syndication between it and the consumer-facing Dailymotion.com platform, customizable player designs and streamlined file uploading and encoding. Underscoring that all these features are table stakes for OVPs, in a briefing earlier this week, Roland Hamilton, managing director of Dailymotion US and product head Florent Pajani emphasized that pricing and an all-inclusive approach will be Dailymotion Cloud's main differentiators.

Dailymotion Cloud is available with no-commitment and is aimed mainly at small-to-medium sized entities. Pricing is $.125 per streamed hour or $1.875 per hosted hour. In an illustrative example, Dailymotion Cloud provided, a customer's cost to deliver a 90 minute video that is around 2.6GB would be $.19, which compares to a "market price" for competitiors of $.53 Dailymotion cited. I haven't done this type of price-based comparison for various OVPs, but no doubt prospective Dailymotion Cloud customers will be encouraged to do so as they consider switching.

Dailymotion Cloud has a big promotional advantage since there are millions of publishers already distributing via Dailymotion.com. Dailymotion Cloud now offers them an opportunity to distribute independently and maintain greater control. Still, these publishers have had lots of OVP choices for a while, so it's not clear how compelled they'll be by Dailymotion Cloud. We'll see.